Prof KM Yip

Department of Humanities & Social Science

Course:
HUMA071 Logical Thinking (over 200 students)

Format of Weekly Meetings:

• Two 100-minute lectures
• Four to five 1-hour tutorial sessions (in a semester)

Preparing Materials

She particularly focuses on the preparation process of large class. She spends a lot time to find timely topics, topics with implications of different levels of difficulty, that will interest the students with various learning motivation and background.

Sometimes she posts difficult problems on logic to challenge the students. They see the exercise as a competition and enjoy doing it. Online technology provides her the means to disseminate these timely challenges effectively.

Arranging TAs' Work

TAs are not required to come to lecture unless they need the knowledge, but they need to conduct tutorials independently. Their main responsibility is to guide small group discussions and help students improve on their analytical thinking skills.

Training TAs

She has very good support from her department head on resources for TAs. However, their backgrounds vary and she has to train them prior to the tutorials.

Deciding Use of Tutorial Sessions

In tutorials, TAs guide small group discussions on articles of arguments that students should have read in advance. She wants them to practice their higher order thinking skills.

Managing Class (Lecture)

To her, class management is seldom a problem. Students are motivated to come since it is an elective course. If there is some chatting going on, she would ask them respectfully to share with the class their concern. She approaches the question from a student's perspective and tries to treat them as equals. Usually students who discuss non-course related matters will get the message and stop chatting because they understand they should respect their fellow classmates as the instructor respects them the first place. However, quite often the chatting is related to the subject and she would use that as a lead to start a discussion among the students.

Managing Class (Tutorial/Lab)

She sample checks and attends some of the tutorials to see if the sessions are working well in addition to prior planning meetings with TAs.

Teaching Strategies

Her teaching strategy requires time. For courses in Philosophy, such as her Logical Thinking course, or in most Liberal Arts subjects, they will need more time for the instructor to 'get into' a topic: the approach is less direct then some science courses. As a result, she designs 80 minute lecture to accomplish this goal.

In addition, stimulation is a top priority for her and it requires time: time to present, to arouse interest, to let students respond, to give her feedback, and to assess if they understand.

She also feels the students' response to the first activity in a lecture is most crucial. This activity, which is based on real life examples, has to work to maintain the interest level for the entire session.

Assessment

Marking is a challenge. In addition to other assessments, students need to write an essay which weighs 10%, at the end of the semester to show their understanding of the course's aims. She marks all of them personally. This takes her a couple of days to mark all 200 some papers and to give feedback. However, she enjoys the task because she is always happily surprised by her students' insights and analytical skills.